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Neutrinos from Hell: the Dawn of Neutrino Geophysics

Details

Date

Wednesday, August 01 2012 - 12:00 pm, PDT

Speaker

Giorgio Gratta

Affiliation

Physics Department, Stanford University

Description

Seismic waves have been for long time the only messenger reporting on the conditions deep inside the Earth. While global seismology provides amazing details about the structure of our planet, it is only sensitive to the mechanical properties of rocks and not to their chemical composition. In the last few years KamLAND and Borexino have started measuring anti-neutrinos produced by Uranium and Thorium inside the Earth.

Such "Geoneutrinos" double the number of tools available to study the Earth's interior, enabling a sort of global chemical analysis of the planet, albeit for two elements only.

Dr. Gratta will discuss the results of these new measurements and put them in the context of the Earth Sciences.